1. Field
The present invention relates, in general, to an apparatus for detecting and recognizing a face in an image. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus that recognizes a face using a non-statistical method, and especially recognizes the face of a human being in real time using only an embedded device for performing parallel processing.
2. Description of Related Art
In image processing and analysis, the face of a person is an important feature in visual discrimination and identification. From the early 1990s, analytical technologies for the recognition of a face and the interpretation of facial expressions have been widely developed. Recently, Moving Picture Experts Group-7 (MPEG-7) face descriptors have been proposed so as to search a sequence of images for a face and identify the corresponding person. Unlike conventional face recognition algorithms, the principal function of the face descriptors is to search for face images identical to an image of a person who has been inquired about as promptly and effectively as possible.
Face recognition technology denotes technology for identifying one or more persons using a given face database (DB) for faces of one or more persons present in a still image or a moving image.
Generally, face recognition is implemented using software in a typical sequential system due to the complexity of the performance thereof. Such a method encounters difficulties when a real-time operation is performed in the field of face recognition that requires very large data throughput. Further, the method is problematic in that, since a Personal Computer (PC) is used, system cost becomes high and a system size increases.